http://www.darkreavers.co.uk DarkReavers.co.uk Blog RSS Feed en-gb Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:27:42 GMT Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:27:42 GMT Copyright DarkReaver13 2010 http://www.darkreavers.co.uk/images/linkbuttons/darkreavers.co.uk_120x60.gif http://www.darkreavers.co.uk http://backend.userland.com/rss darkreaver13@darkreavers.co.uk (DarkReaver13) darkreaver13@darkreavers.co.uk (DarkReaver13) http://www.darkreavers.co.uk “If your enemy is watching your knife, spoon out his eye.” I watched a History Channel documentary on Sun Tzu's Art of War yesterday, and whilst the above quote didn't come from Sun Tzu (indeed, I myself lay claim to that little parcel of wisdom) it was very, very interesting. I've read the Art of War, however the documentary successfully extracted some of the most prominent strategic ideas and applied to them to historical conflicts ranging from ancient... Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:15:04 GMT http://www.darkreavers.co.uk/blog?id=191 Blog Entries http://www.darkreavers.co.uk I've recently gone over a few related topics to do with programming and/or web development. The pejorative term "spaghetti code" gets thrown around a lot, however I think many of the people who use it don't really understand what it means. Some use it to describe where HTML, PHP, SQL, CSS and Javascript are all intermingled; but this isn't (necessarily) spaghetti code. Similarly, others use it to describe the lack of a layered architecture or framework (such as MVC)... Sun, 13 Sep 2009 14:15:18 GMT http://www.darkreavers.co.uk/blog?id=190 Blog Entries http://www.darkreavers.co.uk It's been a long time since I really thought about Anarcho-Capitalism/Market Anarchism, probably because I've been so busy working, moving house and dislocating my knee. In fact, the last time it was on my mind was last November when I private messaged on YouTube about it; I'm sure he's forgotten all about that by now. Anyway, arguments between Market Anarchists and Minarchists (whether Libertarians or... Sat, 12 Sep 2009 21:42:23 GMT http://www.darkreavers.co.uk/blog?id=189 Blog Entries http://www.darkreavers.co.uk MVC stands for Model-View-Controller and is an architectural pattern used in programming. The intention behind the pattern is to separate presentation from logic, much in the same way that CSS stylesheets separate the visual elements of a webpage from the structural HTML markup. Models represent the data, the view represents how the data is displayed to the user and the controller deals with the interaction between the two. Before I go any further, please be aware that this blog... Sun, 30 Aug 2009 14:21:10 GMT http://www.darkreavers.co.uk/blog?id=188 Blog Entries http://www.darkreavers.co.uk As may be indicated by the title, I'm a big fan of Occam's Razor. For anyone who has never heard of it, it's a philosophical principle which states "entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily". Basically; keep things as simple as possible, because the simplest answer is probably the best answer. Although the principle originally applied to scientific and philosophical hypotheses, I strongly believe it is highly applicable to web design and development.
Mon, 24 Aug 2009 10:59:11 GMT http://www.darkreavers.co.uk/blog?id=187 Blog Entries http://www.darkreavers.co.uk As a professional web developer, it's my job to make sure all the websites I make are coded nicely to ensure firstly that everything runs efficiently and bug-free, and secondly that future development will be relatively straightforward. Being a massive perfectionist is pretty useful here because it means I've adopted a very strict coding standard which I use for every project. Over the past month or so I've been tasked to work on some websites that have been built by... Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:02:37 GMT http://www.darkreavers.co.uk/blog?id=186 Blog Entries http://www.darkreavers.co.uk I decided to redesign my site yet again. The previous design was good but I felt it was too blocky. Here's a list of the main changes: The site is now a fair bit wider than bef... Fri, 17 Jul 2009 12:04:53 GMT http://www.darkreavers.co.uk/blog?id=185 Blog Entries http://www.darkreavers.co.uk I've been doing a lot of object-oriented PHP recently, going through my older sites and revamping the code to make it more object-oriented (where it's suitable). For the past couple of days I've been working on my own BBCode parser class because I have been unable to find a pre-made one which isn't A) over-complicated, massive and therefore slow, B) buggy or C) missing features that I need (or a combination of the above). I looked at around 20 different classes and... Sat, 20 Jun 2009 13:57:28 GMT http://www.darkreavers.co.uk/blog?id=184 Blog Entries http://www.darkreavers.co.uk Yes, rejoice as I post the first blog entry in almost a year. I actually started writing a new entry a few times but never got round to finishing them and lost what I'd wrote. I've been working a lot for my business making websites and doing a ton of admin. One of the most impressive feats was developing a custom accountancy system which calculates our wages, gross/net profit, national insurance contributions, VAT, income tax, expenses etc., which is possibly one of the most... Fri, 15 May 2009 16:12:11 GMT http://www.darkreavers.co.uk/blog?id=181 Blog Entries http://www.darkreavers.co.uk This is the latest movie for the Dark Reavers Team Fortress 2 clan. It uses some of the same clips from the previous movie but it is in black and white and features the newest [DkR] theme tune. Enjoy! The high quality version is... Tue, 27 May 2008 07:24:21 GMT http://www.darkreavers.co.uk/blog?id=179 Blog Entries